Honouring Master Cheh

One Armed Swordsman "was released in mid-1967, and, from then, Hong Kong cinema was never the same again".

The work of filmmaker Chang Cheh features at this year's Melbourne film festival, writes John Snadden.

Chinese film director Chang Cheh is often described as the godfather of Hong Kong action cinema. And rightly so; for a 20-year period from the mid-1960s, Chang's movies changed the face of the Cantonese martial arts genre.

In a career spanning 50 years, he's credited with directing more than 100 films and his influence on Asian and American filmmakers has been enormous - Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill a prime example.

Chang liked keeping it simple: telling straightforward stories about complicated people. And more than anything, his films were always a visceral experience.

Chang's cinema was primarily a world without women; a masculine brotherhood where honour and loyalty ruled supreme - but a realm where the hero didn't always win or survive. Not surprisingly, he was heavily influenced by the works of maverick directors Akira Kurosawa, Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah.

Born in 1923 in China, Chang developed a love of movies at an early age. After a stop-start film career on the mainland and Taiwan, he landed in Hong Kong during the early 1960s. Studio mogul Run Run Shaw gave Chang the opportunity to lift the Cantonese martial arts movie out of the doldrums.

One Armed Swordsman, starring Taiwanese actor Wang Yu, was released in mid-1967, and, from then, Hong Kong cinema was never the same again. Audiences flocked to a film whose main character became a blood-drenched killing machine in a bitter tale of revenge. Young people loved the new vitality of the genre. Chang and the Shaw Brothers had hit a box-office motherlode.

The next decade saw Chang make almost 60 features (some as a co-director), nearly all martial arts plus some contemporary dramas. Of the latter, the most notable was a brutal nightmare of crime and corruption, The Delinquents.

Chang instilled a violent sensuality in his movies; young muscular bodies always glistened with sweat and training routines gave them an Adonis-like appeal. The flipside was that such bodies were regularly beaten, stabbed and disemboweled in graphic combat sequences.

Along with the studio, Chang created a repertory of stars, the best known being David Chiang and Ti Lung. On-screen, Chiang was charismatic and dangerous, the perfect foil to the austere, handsome Lung.

Blood Brothers is arguably Chang's best film and easily Ti Lung's best role, as a rebel who becomes an entrenched despot. The emotional and political power of this picture is undeniable. A young assistant director, John Woo, worked on it.

During the early 1970s, future Cantonese filmmakers Tsui Hark (Time and Tide) and Ringo Lam (Full Contact) were watching Chang's movies in Kowloon theatres and having their minds opened to the possibilities of the cinema. Both went on to produce homages to Master Cheh: Hark with his One Armed Swordsman remake, The Blade, and Lam with the subterranean martial arts epic Burning Paradise.

As always, working with the genre, Chang had a lot of fun with The Heroic Ones, a stylised take on The Magnificent Seven and The Dirty Dozen, starring David Chiang as a pumped-up hero riding for a fall. Chang's sardonic wit has the film's climactic bloodbath taking place on the "bridge of peace".

With films like these it's not hard to see how the fervent minds of a young Tarantino or Rodriguez went into overload when watching Chang's movies back in the 1980s on grainy bootleg tapes. Hong Kong martial arts movies were showing what could be achieved with genre material - freedom to use a genre, not be restricted by it.

From the late 1970s, Chang produced some of the most original martial arts films ever seen. The Five Venoms is a kung fu whodunit, with the "unusual suspects" being former students of the victim. Although fight-lite, it shows in detail a dazzling display of reptile-fu.

Chang's success mirrored his time with the Shaw Brothers' studio and with its eventual decline came Chang's twilight years. The quality and output of his movies dropped substantially.

Chang died in 2002 of a pulmonary condition. His death was virtually ignored in the West. Hopefully, with the increasing availability of his films on DVD and the film festival circuit, Chang will receive the credit he richly deserves. One day, he might even be elevated to the level of a John Ford or Kurosawa. Like them, Chang took a tarnished genre and created an artform.

Hidden Hero: the Films of Chang Cheh, featuring seven Chang Cheh films, screens in the Melbourne International Film Festival, which opens tomorrow. The Age is a MIFF sponsor.